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Sing: Live Forever

One of my most favourite childhood memories were drumming along to Oasis’ albums on the dashboard in my dad’s van, which I’m certain I’ve mentioned before.

I didn’t really know or understand the depth of the lyrics, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. Yet Oasis shaped and inspired me from a very young age. I was captivated by Noel’s lyrics of the working class under-dog, trying to make something worthwhile with the life we have been given. Oasis inspired me to write, and not only just write, but to represent my friends, neighbours, the voices of the working people that I’m so fond of around me.

Fast forward to thirteen years later when I’m driving in my clapped out Citroen Saxo named Steve aside my best friend in the early hours heading towards Blackpool. Obviously, we need a road-trip playlist, and I eagerly suggest Oasis to which I’m almost floored by her response of groaning.
“You don’t like Oasis?!” I stammer, snatching the ipod out of her hands and averting my eyes momentarily from the road; Steve I’m depending on you in this moment.

Steve pulls through and so does Oasis. The next hour and a half we spend together pausing the songs and talking them through, but Live Forever was the song that has stuck so vividly in our minds. A song about friendship, loyalty, and above all, having a fucking ace time with your best mate. Poor Steve is stuttering along the motorway and Blackpool is greeted with the Mancs: windows down, cheap cigs, screeching Liam’s “sunshine” and a horrendous emulsifying pounding beneath my tires. But we’re not in Blackpool, we’re in the 90s. We’re in a time warp of the past when the beers were cheap, the drugs were better, lads wore bucket hats, and a generation of suffering youth rebelled against their parents and the curse that Thatcher had left behind. I thought about Steve transforming into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as we fly along, partly because I’m driving so damn fast, but mainly as our spirits are lifted as we practically scream along to ‘Maybe I just want to fly, wanna live I don’t wanna die”.

But the part that really struck us, were the lyrics:
“Maybe I don’t really wanna know
How your garden grows, cause’ I just wanna fly”

We thought about friendship, and in particular, our friendship. We didn’t care what one another got up to, we’re impartial from judging each other because we’re one and the same. We didn’t care if our gardens had weeds from the past, because we fly when we’re together.
Often we think about the same things, talk and discuss in ways that we don’t think other people could identify with. It’s like finally finding your soul mate, you just click. The words:
“Maybe I will never be all the things that I wanna be
But now is not the time to cry, now’s the time to find out why
I think you’re the same as me, we see things they’ll never see
You and I, we’re gonna live forever”
is just the perfect summary. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. Two teenagers, facing uncertainty about our futures, unemployment, swimming in a tsunami of 21st century fraud and corruption. Was no one else seeing this? It felt like it was just us two, and playing that song really captivated that feeling.

Fast forward a few more years, we’ve come home from travelling in Uganda together, I’m living in Madrid as a student intern for a year, and she is working in Manchester. Long, it seems, are the days of us dossing around in her Heathside den, facing ASBO’s and dealing with off-the-wall friends; we’re adults now. We have real jobs and real shit to get done. But damn, does it seem like the contrary when we’re together!
And that’s why this song still feels so significant to us, and will do for the rest of our lives.

So last week, in Madrid, we got ‘Live Forever’ tattooed on our legs.

Never underestimate the power of music bringing people together. So sing, show everyone the music that represents you, you might make a life-long soul mate out of it.